The ‘best’ traffic source may surprise you after going through this….

Way back when I got started online I thought paid traffic was the ONLY way to go in business.

This was 2011 and I knew with the emergence of Facebook and other platforms that media buying wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Now the ironic thing is, I also didn’t have the capital to run ads, so I was kind of stuck.

I knew the importance of creating assets such as blogs, so rather than spinning my wheels over multiple methods, I created blogs on the financial markets (I was working for one of the world’s largest derivatives brokers at the time

The goal was to build an asset which would create income which would allow me to fund paid traffic to various landing pages.

It was a dismal failure and after months of writing articles, trying to rank my blog and get traction on my affiliate links, nothing was working.

Here’s a real life depiction of what I was like in the earlier days…

…So instead of bashing my head against a wall trying to make something work, I pivoted.

Then when that wasn’t working, I’d pivot again and so on.

It was a tactic that didn’t work out too well as I never gave something long enough to see what it would produce.

Finally, a multitude of failed attempts, I hired my first mentor to help me build out shopify stores.

It was a lot of money for me and what was taught was amazing.

I did end up with some traction and a few sales and for once in my online career I could see that something might actually work.

I later used the skills I’d built from running ads to setup my own agency and charge clients for lead generation services.

It worked well and in spite of only having one official client, I quit work and went full time with it in 2017.

I later ran multiple 6-figures in ads across a range of industries for both my own projects and clients.

I ran ads across dozens of platforms in different styles and made some good money in a few along the way, although never lasting with the exception of my lead generation ads for my clients.

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….Anyways, I say all that because eventually after years of running ads for other businesses and my own, Facebook shut down my account and it was not retrievable.

This forced me to pivot my business and so I decided to build something longer lasting - a personal brand.

It was tough going at the start, but I’d had so much experience across so many different industries at that point, I knew I had something worthy of sharing.

I finally got some traction after a few months and I partnered with some awesome folks to grow our coaching business to $1mil in 14 months.

We helped hundreds of students and many of them went on to do hundreds of thousands in revenue for their own businesses as well.

ORGANIC

The benefits are pretty incredible with organic traffic…

1. It’s free to start
   

2. You can build at your own pace
   

3. It’s not super complex or difficult to build an audience (I just built one on a new platform where I didn’t leverage my existing audience at all and now have 1200 or so followers in just a matter of weeks.
   

4. You’re not wasting money on testing
   

5. You don’t need funnels or any tools to make 5-6 figures with an organic audience
   

But….

There is a downside too!

• It takes the only resource we can’t replace (time)
  

• You have to be very consistent
  

• You can’t expect results overnight and that burns most people out
  

• You’re closer to your audience so it’s easier to compare which can wreak havoc on your mindset
  

• Every platform is on rented space - you don’t own anything and your accounts can be shut down without warning (This happens with ads too, mind you).
  

Organic traffic is great if you don’t have a budget - heck it’s even better if you do in many ways.

It can be time consuming, but the payoffs are huge when you’ve built an ecosystem that fuels itself and gets eyeballs on your offers.

I’ve made multiple 7-figures from what is essentially a tiny audience of less than 20k across all my social media and email accounts. Kind of crazy to think of when you put it like that.

PAID TRAFFIC

Ah yes, the holy grail.

Simply turn an ad on and wallah, instant cash, right?

Mmm, not quite. First, let’s look at the benefits of paid traffic…

1. It’s automated traffic you don’t need to exchange your time for to get
   

2. You can scale infinitely (n theory) with paid traffic
   

3. You don’t need to be everywhere and be on every platform to get it to work
   

4. It can be relatively cost-effective to start - kind of. More on that in a sec
   

Here’s what’s not so obvious when you’re weighing up this debate…

• You need a decent budget for testing. It’s suggested you need around 3x the cost of your offer.
  

• Different platforms provide different experiences - Youtube ads are great for webinars and call funnels, but not so great for low ticket ascension style funnels.
  

• You ‘think’ it’s a matter of turning on an ad and watching the dollaz roll in, but the reality is you have to create a ton of content for testing.
  

• Even when you do get a winning ad, it tends to fatigue quickly, so you always need to test new ads, new funnels, new angles, new hooks and new offers.
  

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So with all that said, what’s the ‘best’ option?

In my experience, using both in combination.

Although, I’ll throw a caveat on that one and say if you don’t have much of a budget, I’d definitely stick with organic until you can fund your way into paid.

But when you transition, understand that it’s going to take a lot of work.

Your funnel, offer and back end follow up needs to be dialled in or you’ll be throwing money against a wall.

If you spend time creating an organic audience, you’ll find running ads to that warm audience will yield some low hanging fruit and easy sales.

That said, if you have the cashflow to fund your ads when getting started, they are the fastest way to scale your income.

A colleague of mine has called his business to $450k / month through paid media and now realises how vulnerable his business is and is building an organic audience to back things up when ad accounts go down, or other disasters strike.

MY STRATEGY?

Pretty simple;

Organically build my audience on ONE platform, then ad layers on other platforms and finally ramp it all up with paid media.

This balance means I have an ecosystem of warm prospects at all times.

The most important aspect of all this is to own your audience. That is, to ensure you’re building your list as early as possible.

We are on rented space on these platforms and your list is the only thing you ever truly own.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Jamie